I’ve just installed the Windows 8 Customer Preview on my netbook to see what all the fuss was about, and first impressions are…

…strangely positive!

The install took about 20mins from booting from the USB installer to having a working desktop. From that desktop, I noted that all the components were immediately usable, including a reasonable driver for the Intel GMA3150 graphics chipset.

I then tried to play with the Metro apps, quickly finding that they all require a desktop resolution of 1024×768. Since this machine (and pretty much every other netbook I’ve encountered) has a small 1024×600 panel, none of the new apps work. Frankly, given that the Metro interface is most suited to such small displays, this seems to be a bit of an own-goal on Microsoft’s part, and something that I think ought to be fixed before the final release if MS wants to give an incentive for a lot of users like me to spend real money to upgrade.

Besides Metro, the rest of the desktop interface seems to make sense. The new Start interface seems to work, and I was soon able to remove entries for the Metro apps I won’t be using. In doing so, I noted that the tiling and grouping doesn’t seem to be as flexible as most users would like – I wasn’t able to choose a tile colour or size for other installed apps, nor was I able to change their labels.

After installing Chrome, Thunderbird (with Lightning and Google Address Book addons), LibreOffice and a couple of other apps to get real work done, I’ve found the rest of the interface informative and swift.

One surprise as a former XP user wo migrated to Mac OS X, is the ability to calibrate the display colour output using a built-in tool from the Control Panel. It’s simple but surprisingly effective, removing the blue-tint. I tried this in Windows 7 when the netbook still had it, but it wasn’t terribly effective – perhaps a user error on my part.

It seems to me that for the kinds of admin, email, browsing and media consuming tasks I’d usually put this netbook to, 2Gb RAM is enough to keep Windows 8 happy – even with an email client, multiple Chrome tabs, iTunes, Dropbox, LibreOffice Write and some other apps open, memory use rarely topped 1.3Gb – better than my Dell Inspiron 6000 running similar workloads on XP.

So I’ll be sticking with this for a while, and will report back with more findings when I have time.

16 thoughts on “Windows 8 Consumer Preview on Asus EeePC 1011px”

Been over a week since this post, and I’m still really enjoying this setup. As part of an ongoing road-test of MS Office 2010 I have a bunch of notes lovingly typed into OneNote over the last week or so as I’ve found new things to post about, which should hopefully be distilled into a full post sometime this week. As always – look out for updates on this!

Odd – I’m sure that’s the Wireless chipset in mine, and mine’s been working just great!

As for the touchpad – that works well too, sometimes too well when typing where it gets accidentally clicked. I downloaded a little utility to filter accidental clicks and haven’t looked back – will update when I can remember which one it was and where I found it.

Both devices working out-of-the-box without installing extra drivers and software. Some of the software from the Asus website (for hotkeys, as an example) didn’t seem to load, but at least the display brightness controls work out-of-the-box without extra software. Just wish the same was true of the volume control keystrokes!

Did anybody get the Hotkeys for Volume/WiFi/External Monitor to work? I tried the KB_Filter_WIN7 in compatibility modes for XP (SP3), Windows 7.. none work: The BIOS and Realtek HD Audio drivers worked fine..?

i have a eee 1011px too and it says that ACPI driver is missing and hotkey and hybrid machine dont work. is there any solution? is it apity couse i like win8 but if keeps having such problems i will have to go back to win7 😦

i have also eee pc 1011px and my win works perfectly, yet 1024×600 remains a problem, cant go to 1024×768 like in win 7, need to find solution how!!
quartan: i dont know, for me it worked in my case…hmm

I can highly recommend the actual release copy of Windows 8 – I’m now running the 32-bit edition from real licensed DVD’s and everything except the hotkeys seems to be working well. I suspect the hotkeys can be fixed by downloading the right drivers from the Asus website. Will have a try on this and post again later.

I wanna make a pair of questions. At first, I’ve got the ASUS EEE PC 1011 PX, 2 gb RAM, and Windows 7 Ultimate. I bought an additional RAM because of the slowness. Now, with 2 gb it goes on! But I think it can works better. Do you think to get W8 professional is a good idea? I tried to update W7 to W8 (I wanted to see if the PC was compatible) W8 installer said that “fast start system is not supported” What should I do (afraid of damaging pc) (From what I’ve readed, default resolution (not 1024×768) can be configured and changed without problems?)

Not sure about fast start warning – you might want to turn to Google searching for more info.

I’ve upgraded mine, also running 2GB RAM, to Windows 8 Professional and never looked back since. I installed mine from scratch, removing the old hidden Windows 7 Starter Edition recovery partition in the process.

Built-in display at 1024×600 is supported without extra drivers, but Metro won’t work unless you do a registry hack to enable a squashed display at 1024×768. While Metro Apps are great, I advise against the hack, and simply consider the upgraded installation a faster update to Windows 7.

All the hardware works with default Windows 8 drivers, except the hot keys, which I’ve neither managed to get working nor missed. That said, the display brightness hot keys work nicely.

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